Silent Sunday Explained – Vignette for Android

This was one of the first photographs I took with the Vignette camera app for my Android phone. It’s 2 of my kids having breakfast in the villa we rented in Lanzarote during the October half term. Vignette was the first Android app I purchased. I’ve spoken about it before here on the blog. Since then it’s been updated several times, each time the changes have been subtle and have added to the app. It’s not become bloated (unlike the Google+ app which got very bloated very quickly and is in danger of being removed).

My only problem with the app, and it’s really very minor, is that if you have it set to apply random filters and frames, there’s no bullet-proof way to determine what effects were applied to a picture. So I’ve no idea how to re-create the above shot (other than that it’s a panoramic frame).

The Vignette post on my blog has been hit quite a few times, and here are answers to a couple of the questions that have reached it (i.e. the ones I know or have worked out the answers to):

Where do my original photos go?

Vignette has an option in the settings to save the original version of the photograph you took before filters and frames were applied. Having this switched on doesn’t appear to affect the speed the app works at. I don’t have the original of the photo above, I was still playing with the settings. However, here’s a compare and contrast:

Anyway. As long as you’ve got this option switched on, you’ll find the originals in this folder:

/DCIM/camera

You can tell they’re the ones saved by Vignette, they’ll have -orig at the end of the filename.

Is there a desktop equivalent to Vignette?

There’s a couple of things that come close. A plugin for Google Chrome called Lomo+, filters and suchlike for Photoshop and GIMP, but the easiest thing to do is this:

Hook your phone up to the computer with the USB cable, copy the pictures you want to transform into a folder on the phone’s SD card, disconnect from the PC. You can load photos that are already on the SD card into Vignette and apply whatever effects you like.

I’ve tried a couple of other camera apps on my phone but Molome didn’t do what I needed to and the other one whose name escapes was too large and I’d run out of room on my old G2. When I upgrade in February, I’ll have a phone I can get a few more of these onto!